Sign me up for the 'Game of Thrones' doomsday fireplace club

Monday

[WARNING: This post contains major spoilers from the second episode of “Game of Thrones’” final season. You have been warned.]

You have one night until the army of the dead arrives on your doorstep – how do you spend it?

Maybe you choose to take your first taste of passion in the forge like Arya and Gendry. Or you sulk away in the crypt to learn you’ve been sleeping with your nephew who can totally take your claim to the Iron Throne like Dany and Jon. Or instead, you make slightly amorous eyes over bread bowls at the height of a grain shortage like Sansa and Theon.

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Wherever you can find comfort as the doomsday clock ticks closer to midnight is your business. Where would I be, you ask? You could find me crowded around the fireplace for, perhaps, the most humorously and emotionally satisfying casual gathering of characters “Game of Thrones” has ever mounted.

Sunday’s second episode of the HBO drama’s final season – one of my favorite hours of the whole series – felt like that teen comedy that unfolds over the last night before high school graduation.

All of the feelings of the prior four years bubble up until you can’t hold onto your words, emotions or hormones anymore. This was certainly the case as nearly every major character – save for Cersei and a pair of dragons – contemplated their mortality with news the Night King and his White Walkers were to arrive at Winterfell before dawn.

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A sleepless night can be a rich framework with which to explore the combustible relationships between characters who have books and books of history. But with only five episodes of “Game of Thrones” to go, the show had to pick the right moments to flesh out and give attention to with about six dozen options from which to choose. For the most part, it chose the right ones.

But none of the sequences were more entertaining and quietly powerful than the consortium of fireplace dwellers in Tyrion, Jaime, Brienne, Tormund, Pod and Davos.

Call it a sort of “Breakfast Club” on the edge of doomsday.

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We start off with some brotherly banter between the Lannister boys after years apart, only to have Brienne and Pod join the party just in time for Brienne to nurse her tense friendship with Jaime and her apprentice to start pre-gaming the coming battle with wine.

Then enter a freezing Davos looking for warmth, followed by a sexually aggressive Tormund and his disturbingly awkward story of how he got his “Giantsbane” nickname. Not to mention more of his not-so-subtle advances toward Brienne.

The night led to Brienne lamenting that tradition states women can’t be knights, something Jaime balked at. So the Kingslayer, a knight himself with the ability to knight others, took it upon himself to give Brienne the title she always wanted in, hands down, one of this show’s best scenes ever.

As Jaime touched the sword to each of the battle-harden warrior’s shoulders, you felt the emotion, the respect and the honor of what he was giving to her.

Brienne of Tarth has come so far since we first met her, battling for respect and fighting to keep the promises she made to the Stark family. In this moment, as three relatively important people in her life looked on, she was finally bestowed the honor deserved.

When Ser Brienne of Tarth rose with tears in her eyes and a proud smile on her face, she wasn’t alone. It was a masterful performance from Gwendoline Christie – and really the whole lot of actors, whose peanut-gallery cheers felt geniune.

As revealed after the episode aired, Brienne’s big moment also inspired the hour’s title – “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.” I’m not crying, you are!

For casual viewers, “Game of Thrones” can, at times, feel like a game of catch-up, trying to remember the intertwined threads of the 1,200 or so characters, where their stories have taken them and who likes/hates who.

But as these people crowded together with only their quiet fear, warm fire and Pod’s smooth singing voice to comfort them, there was no question who they were, all they had done to get here and why this moment of levity, drunkenness and rightful poignancy carried so much weight.

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By the end of the episode, the White Walkers had arrived and next week’s all-out war is going to be the biggest thing “Game of Thrones” – or any show for that matter – has ever put on your TV screen.

But for those fleeting moments on the brink of war, there is no place in Winterfell I’d rather be than a member of the doomsday fireplace club.

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